Adequate resources, advanced technology, and low costs – the coal chemical industry in China has promising prospects in three key areas

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Abundant resources, advanced technology, and low costs – three key factors contributing to the promising development of coal chemical industry in China. Author/Source: Date: 2017-11-01. Clicks: 42. Recently, a seminar on the development of modern coal chemical technologies under new circumstances was held in Beijing. Many experts, scholars, and enterprise representatives from the coal chemical industry attended the meeting. At the meeting, the participants agreed that China has broad prospects for the development of modern coal chemistry; in particular, coal-to-gas, coal-to-hydrogen, and coal-to-acetylene processes hold great potential for future development due to factors such as abundant resources and low costs. Coal-to-gas: Clean production holds great potential. Currently, China’s demand for natural gas is growing rapidly, with an annual gap of 80 billion cubic meters. China lacks natural gas resources, with per capita recoverable reserves accounting for only 5% of the world average. In the coming years, efforts to address smog, the transition from coal to gas, and urbanization will further exacerbate the gas shortage. This provides broad prospects for the development of coal-to-natural gas technology. In particular, the new types of coal-to-gas technologies currently being developed can avoid problems related to heat and cold during the production process, improve energy efficiency, and reduce wastewater emissions by at least 30%, thus meeting the requirements of clean production. Xu Wenqiang, the chief technology officer at the China Institute for Low-Carbon Clean Energy, explained that coal-to-natural gas is a method of utilizing coal resources with an extremely high rate of resource conversion. In terms of energy efficiency in coal utilization and conversion, coal-based power generation has an energy efficiency of only 39%–42% due to high costs associated with long-distance transportation and energy storage ； The energy efficiency of traditional coal-to-gas conversion is 50%~52% ； With technological advancements and maturity, the efficiency of energy utilization and conversion in new coal-to-gas processes can reach over 60%. Xu Wenqiang emphasized that the new coal-to-natural gas process benefits from the use of a core technology – a sulfur-tolerant methanation catalyst – which results in a simplified process, lower investment and operation costs, as well as a reduction of the load on the acid gas removal step by 1/2. In the future, with advances in technology, coal-to-natural gas is expected to maintain high activity and stability in the presence of CO2 and H2O, with its resistance to carbon deposition aiming to reach a ratio of H2∶CO=1∶1. Furthermore, compared to traditional coal-to-gas methods, the new coal-to-natural gas processes and catalysts require no extensive desulfurization during gas production, and natural gas pipelines can tolerate H2S